Why He'll Never Fall For You If You Try Too Hard To 'Earn' His Affection

When you work to earn a man’s love — doing things for him (his laundry, cooking him meals, calling him to "help" with problems, driving him around) or giving him gifts (money for his bills, letting him live with you free of charge, buying him clothes or expensive trinkets) — you still won't make him fall in love with you.

Any couple that has a successful relationship will tell you that keeping a relationship takes invested work. However, earning the love of a man is not the kind of work you should ever be invested in. Because understanding how to get a guy to like you isn't about doing things for him.

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To elaborate, let me start with a little fable.

Say a little elf showed up on your doorstep one morning, knocking on the door and calling your name to come outside. Imagine you opened the door and looked down, only to find him standing there, adorable as can be, holding a beautiful diamond necklace in his little pudgy hands.

Imagine, then, that he held the necklace out to you, offering it to you. You may be hesitant to take it, wondering why he is giving you such a gift and even thinking that it’s a trick or a manipulation. But, say, he assures you that he is only giving it to you because he thinks you are special and that he wants you to have it.

You would probably take it, right? I would.

Now, say he comes back the next day — this time dragging behind him a mop and a broom. He tells you he wants to come in and clean your house, free of charge. Would you let him? Maybe, if he seems trustworthy and if you have some time to burn so you can supervise him in your house.

Imagine he comes back every morning for two weeks, bringing different gifts and offering different services. Imagine you begin to really appreciate him, trust him, like having him and his acts of love around you.

Now, let’s imagine one morning after he’s been working hard at buffing your dirty floors, he asks for a back rub. You look at his bony back covered in warty elf skin and you decide it’s something you’d rather not do. So you say "no."

Imagine he looks up at you with his sad, little, beady eyes and begins to cry, telling you that he has worked so hard for you for weeks and can’t believe you would be so selfish to not give him what he needs from you.

You then explain how you don’t want to give him the back rub, and he gets increasingly angrier and more desperate. He even, that he starts screaming at you. Then, you, in turn, start to feel angry, too, like he keeps asking something of you that you are unwilling to provide.

You eventually kick him out of your home, possibly even feeling guilty. After all, in a way, he was right — he did do all those nice things for you.

Now, imagine he comes around the next morning with a smile and another necklace. You warily open the door, most likely because you feel bad, and he offers up the necklace, pretending nothing happened the day before.

You don’t take the necklace and close the door on him. How do you feel about yourself? Do you feel like you owed it to the elf to rub his back?

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Even if you had been polite and more generous and did warily rub his back, you probably would have stopped opening the door for him in the future because you’d of realized his efforts weren’t really "free." Well, you can probably see where I’m going with this story.

If a man isn’t interested in and attracted to you, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to win him over.

He may take your gifts of love, he may even begin to come to rely on you and your good deeds in his life, but that doesn’t mean he is going to feel "in love" with you or find you attractive. That doesn’t mean he’s not going to leave you when he finds another woman who drives him crazy with love and lust.

What if he only wants you around when you are offering him something? And what if when you need something like a back rub from him, he secretly cringes inside? Does that feel good? It becomes about him and his needs and his happiness. What about your own needs and happiness? 

Can you blame the poor elf in the story for having an emotional outburst over a denied back rub? Yes, he presented all his gifts free of charge, but how rejecting it must have felt for him to be refused a little attention, especially after all that work.

However, at the same time, you can’t blame yourself for refusing, because he did, in fact, offer his gifts and services.

The same goes for a man — you can’t blame a man for not wanting to commit to you or for not loving you. He may be too greedy for his britches, but that doesn’t make him a liar or a bad person for not wanting to be with you forever.

Plus, when you make a man’s happiness the center of your purpose for living, you stop worrying about your health. You may tell yourself and others that you are happiest when he is happy, that doing things for him is all you need to feel content.

But regardless of the loving feelings racing through your heart, you still have needs, you still have "an aching back." And what if he’s not 100 percent there, willing and eager to rub it?!

So think twice before you start working to earn your way into a man’s life. If he isn’t feeling the kind of passion it takes to have him willingly and eagerly trying to give you the key to his heart, he could technically shut the door at any moment.

The real key to a man’s heart lies in his attraction for you, and that’s not something you will ever earn through good deeds and expensive gifts. It lies in chemistry and in emotional connection.

He needs to feel that you are a safe place for him to reveal his vulnerability, and that’s not something you earn by "doing" anything.

Earning a man’s love is about standing still and calm, opening your heart to invite him closer, remaining emotionally available to receive his company and love. The way into a man’s heart is to sit back and let him be the elf in your relationship.

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